I cover science and public policy, environmental sustainability, media ideology, NGO advocacy and corporate responsibility. I'm executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project (www.GeneticLiteracyProject.org), an independent NGO, and Senior Fellow at the World Food Center's Institute for Food and Agricultural Literacy at the University of California-Davis. I've edited/authored seven books on genetics, chemicals, risk assessment and sustainability, and my favorite, on why I never graduated from college football player (place kicker) to pro athlete: "Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It". Previously, I was a producer and executive for 20 yeas at ABC News and NBC News. Motto: Follow the facts, not the ideology. Play hard. Love dogs.

The latest ‘greatest danger to ever face humanity’ emerged with the publication last month of an obscure, technical study in GM Crops & Foods, a prominent biotech journal. The article, ungainly titled “Possible consequences of the overlap between the CaMV 35S promoter regions in plant transformation vectors used and the viral gene VI in transgenic plants,” by scientists Nancy Podevin and Patrick du Jardin, has set off a feeding frenzy among the scientifically unwashed.

“[T]he European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) [charged with overseeing GM crops throughout the European Union] has belatedly discovered that the most common genetic regulatory sequence in commercial GMOs also encodes a significant fragment of a viral gene,” wrote the ISN reporters. The journalists claimed—erroneously—that the “discovery” could pose a serious hazard to human health.

Within hours of its posting on the ISN site, the article was replicated or reported upon by almost every oddball anti-GMO organization and website, led by the notoriously anti-science OCA and the IRT. Headlines like “Could Viral DNA Spawn a Massive GMO Food Recall” sprouted like weeds on sites like Activist Post.

Enquiring readers want to know. I’ll make it easy for them and the chattering classes: “No.”

Déjà vu all over again

This ‘sky is falling’ claim is a familiar trope among anti-science “progressive” organizations and websites. But the tactic appears to be wearing thin with both the public and increasingly with mainstream journalists who only recently have begun challenging the junk journalism that still prevails in reporting about GM crops, foods and animals, and genetic research in general, including in humans.

It’s been a tough few months for the anti-technology hysteriacs. First came Le Affair Séralini in which a brazenly anti-technology French scientist appears to have cooked the research books to propagandize that GM soy products were likely to twist human guts into a cancer-wrenched pretzel. Scientists savaged the study and even anti-GMO academicians distanced themselves from its blatantly poor level of scholarship. Many journalists who had stood on the sidelines as anti-GMO fanatics, fashioning themselves as progressives, propagandized on the issue finally said ‘enough is enough’. Suddenly, biotech activists started to look a lot like the Democrat’s version of global warning deniers.

The Séralini fiasco helped erode the wide but soft support for California Proposition 37, which would have imposed labeling of GMOs—a step the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association and most respectable science organizations opposed as deceptive and counterproductive, as GMOs is a process that poses no known dangers to humans.

The year ended particularly badly for activists when the White House reversed its political opposition to approving the first animal genetically modified for human consumption, a GM slamon that scientists at the Food and Drug Administration had determined was perfectly safe and nutritious. The White House’s turnaround came after a well-publicized investigative article by the Genetic Literacy Project in Slate, and later picked up by scientists and journalists around the world.

Mark Lynas, a British journalist and longtime anti-GMO campaigner who is credited (or blamed, depending upon your perspective) by some with coining the word Frankenfood, delivered a public and articulate denouncement of himself—or rather his former belief that GM crops and foods were a public health and environmental scourge.

“This was … an explicitly anti-science movement,” Lynas told a stunned audience at the annual Oxford Farming Conference, of his past fellow travelers. “I …assisted in demonizing an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.”

These series of events have stunned anti-GMO activists. Perhaps, it’s little surprise that the “anti forces” are trying to regroup, attempting to re-corral the anti-technology herd.

The only virus on the loose is the ‘truth virus’

Activists are propagating a stark and scary. “The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the EU regulatory agency that provides advice on the health and safety of foods, has unwittingly discovered that a majority of the genetic material used in the GMO foods that we see on supermarket shelves today contains the large portion of a viral gene, called simply “Gene VI,’ wrote activist-journalist Marsea Truan earlier this week in Rosebud in an article making the rounds at progressive sites. “Gene VI is arguably unsafe for human consumption and even more unsafe for the ecosystem.”

Literally nothing in that statement is accurate. One of the viral gene journal authors, Nancy Podevin, works for the EFSA. But she didn’t “unwittingly” discover anything as the anti-GMO conspiracy theorists are suggesting. Any journalist remotely familiar with GM research would know that the use of the CaMV promoter in genetic modification has been standard practice since the 1980s. There is no news here.

“Contrary to recent claims, the data published in the paper by Podevin and du Jardin do not represent a new discovery of a viral gene nor do they indicate safety concerns in previously evaluated GMOs,” noted Professor Joe Perry, Chair of the EFSA GMO Panel. who oversees Podevin’s work.

Certainly, the Organic Consumers Association, which has featured and promoted the scare story going on three weeks, knew that this story is both old news and has no teeth. The faux controversy echoes a similar brouhaha that erupted in 1999 after the publication of a paper co-authored by Joe Cummins. Cauliflower Mosaic Viral Promoter – A Recipe for Disaster? promoted the Cummins thesis that a plant gene virus could somehow harm humans. That claim—roughly akin to saying you shouldn’t sneeze around your favorite plant because it might catch your cold—was widely disseminated via a web post by one of his co-authors, Mae-Won Ho.

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Jon, beyond your pro-GMO snark, please enjoy a second helping of GMO-laden food and ingredients. And as a dog lover, you might want to choose organic dog food. Most commercial brands use tons of GMO-fed meat byproducts and GMO grains. The incidence level of cancer and organ-related disease associated with these commodity products is keeping veterinarians extremely busy.

Please cite any peer reviewed study to substantiate your outrageous claim. There are none…and from a biology 101 perspective, there could not be any because the process of genetically modifying a crop could in itself not cause cancer or any disease. Nothing so much as a sneeze has ever been linked to GMOs…and again, if you had even a basic understanding of genetics, you’d realize that you can’t scientifically indict this “process” as a health issue.

Dr Jon It’s not quite so simple as you make out. If a regulator fails to notice a viral gene running right through what they think is a sequence of transgenic DNA they have told the public is doing something else, that makes them incompetent. That is why the paper is in an obscure journal. It is not because it is unimportant, it is BECAUSE its important. The author (vice chair of the European Food Safety Authority GMO panel) could have published this in any fancy journal and polished his career credentials, etc. But he was more concerned with protecting his job and his agency in case someone else found out. Having found it out he couldnt conceal it, that would make him willfully negligent. He had to publish somewhere. He tried unsuccessfully to bury it.

As to the risk/hazard issue I think its better if readers look at the whole piece in Independent Science News http://www.independentsciencenews.org/ where they will find out whether regulators ignoring what they found was justified.

It appears you didn’t read the article. (1) Independent Science News is not a news organization by anti-GMO front. The writers are ignorant of science, as the details of the article reinforce. (2) Regulators did not “fail to notice” anything. It’s been well known since the late 1908s. (3) A viral gene does not “run through” anything; it’s part of the plant; (4) your speculation on why the article was placed in a prestigious journal is absolutely bull-shit. You have zero idea of what you are writing about. I know both of the editors well; one of them is on the board of my organization, the Genetic Literacy Project. NO serious scientist believes there is any “threat” from a harmless plant virus to humans.

Dear Jon Entine 1) I did so read the article, I wrote the original. 2) In case you were referring to your own article (you didnt specify) I can prove I read it by pointing out that you have conflated Ronnie Cummins, Director of OCA, with Joe Cummins who is co-author with Mae-wan Ho of the CaMV recombination article you no doubt read carefully (from thereon). This, I hope you will accept, makes your thesis about the maniacal ‘Cummins’ fixated on GMO viruses slightly less tenable. 3) I am not so ignorant of science. Unlike your interviewees I have a PhD in virology.

@Jon Entine: why would you quote another commentator altogether in attempting to smear the well qualified/published scientist J Latham, who didn’t mention GM strawberries, as ignorant? And how scientifically literate do you think it is to claim that “not so much as a sneeze” has been attributed to GM crop consumption when almost no human feeding trials looking at health effects have been done on GM crops and there is NO epidemiological data? I’ve looked for your scientific qualifications on the web but couldn’t find any. Do you have any?

FYI I just met with ‘serious scientists’ who are actually working in the GM field who disagree with your claim that there is no threat from “a harmless plant virus to humans”. They told me it could easily produce unexpected toxins or allergens and that the published paper does not reassure them at all on this prospect, as all the authors did was compare what they found to KNOWN allergens. This is a very basic and assumption-based exercise. I am not sure why you feel the need to insult Jonathan Latham or to use foul language in what should be a factual discussion about public health issued.

Jonathan Latham is founder of the anti-science anti-GMO front group that helped launch the anti-science and Orwellian named Independent Science News. As for potential harm from genetic modification, we have 30 years of GM “feeding trials” and no reports or hints of even a sneeze in humans. There have been formal studies on animals in labs and short of the Seralini fiasco–an abomination to serious science as even anti-GMO activists now acknowledge….nothing. If you understand the process of GM, you would recognize that the process itself could not cause harm to humans. If you are not open to empirical data then nothing can alter your dogma.